The Ghana Statistical Service (GSS) has rebased the Consumer Price Index (CPI) to reflect current expenditure patterns and consumption patterns.

The rebasing has been done to meet international best practice and help regroup some products like bottled water which has same price and remove certain products like Cinnamon from the basket of goods and services, among others.

Speaking at a sensitization workshop to educate journalists on the rebasing process, Director of Economics, Statistics Directorate of GSS, Asuo Afram, said the rebasing of the CPI was last carried out in 2012.

“The changes are to enable the restructuring of the price building index that goes into the computation of the inflation basket from the current 2012 base year to a new base year of 2018,” he said.

He added that the rebasing was not meant to cover every item in the basket that consumers purchase, but select a representative sample of what they regularly spend money on.

He noted that the pricing items or varieties in the basket of goods and services had been updated from 267 to 400 plus items with the market place also increased from 42 to 44.

“The essence of this update in the rebasing is to produce a consumer basket that is current and conforms to modern day structure,” he said.

Mr. Afram said there has been introduction of a new method of data collection to replace the original handheld devices used by price collectors with modern Smartphones and custom designed applications.

As part of the implementation, half-yearly price collectors training sessions shall be provided by office based staff for the collectors.

He noted that some challenges faced in getting the actual market pricing can be attributed to the lack of cooperation of the target respondents.

Mr. Afram stated that moving forward, there would be a yearly chain link re-basing and improvement in the collaboration between GSS and market/outline owners.